Posts by 45RPM

Re: analogue is just a hotchpotch of compromises

That doesn’t work. Deionised water isn’t costly enough. You need to drink a pint of heavy water.

According to an article in The Times some years back, the most comfortable cars bar none were made by Citroen and Volvo. Which makes, if luxury is your prime concern, a car from Bentley, Rolls Royce, Maybach etc a colossal waste of money.

I suspect that those decks are a similar waste of cash. It’s just willy waving for the clueless super rich. Vulgar, but not actually better.

Re: Hummm....

Diminishing returns? Tell you what - I’m prepared to bet my car that, everything else being equal, 99.99% of the population couldn’t tell the difference between a £500 deck and one more expensive in a blind hearing.

I’m not done with vinyl, any more than I’m done with art. I get a beautiful big picture (the album sleeve), sleeve notes big enough for my increasingly elderly eyes to read, often the vinyl is beautiful too. I enjoy listening to it a few times. And then, ahem, I listen to it from then on on the digital download.

But I’m sure that the quality of the digital download is much improved because I have the vinyl on the shelf. Quantum interference smooths out the imperfections in the sample rate. Or something woowoo like that!

Re: analogue is just a hotchpotch of compromises

I thought it was the specially blessed crystal, which is aligned to the date of your pet cats conception, carefully balanced on the top left corner of the amplifier which made all the difference?

You can get them on special offer at £15,000.

Re: analogue is just a hotchpotch of compromises

Yes, but you can overcome all of those objections if you spend £1,000/meter on speaker cable.

Re: Strange

And now there remain faith, hop, and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is hop.

Sunday lunch was a nightmare. We all had to wear sou’westers for the soup course.

Re: re: sufficient reason to kill someone

don't have sex. It's not going to kill you, it's not even hard to do.

I’d imagine that it’s especially not hard to do if you insist on treating your partner like mindless chattel - and hence have difficulty getting someone to hop into bed with you.

Sex isn’t just about procreation. It’s about building relationships. It’s about love. It’s about the whole damn sticky fun of it.

And thankfully we do have birth control (and morning after pill and etc etc) because otherwise there’d be a whole townful of my offspring - and no one wants that! This planet is already overcrowded enough!

That’s what the research is for. To determine the boundary between cluster of cells and person. To determine the boundary between a life which will be one of pain, and with no quality to it, and one that will be viable.

Furthermore, murder is very emotive (and hence unhelpful) language. Honestly, I have no problem with taking life to take pain away - whether abortion or euthanasia (thinking of people suffering from a terminal and painful illness now). It’s the humane thing to do.

I believe that it’s everyone’s right to decide what they do with their body. And that includes the right to decide that you don’t want a cluster of non-sentient cells growing in it. I am very happy for scientists (actual people who’ve done research) to decide where the boundary is between cluster of cells and person.

I am utterly perplexed that those (largely fundamental religious and largely right wing) people who oppose that position are so steadfast in their dogma that they oppose all termination. Including termination for rape (and by extension incest, paedophilic abuse, spousal abuse etc) or debilitating genetic conditions which would mean that the baby, if it survives to term, would live its life in significant pain and enjoy no quality of life.

The position of denying a woman the right to choose is appallingly inhumane.

Re: Bow down before the market god

You are joking, right? Of course we had control over VAT whilst in the EU.

I disagree. Whilst rejoining the EU has to be an objective, we will all benefit from electing a government which has the best interests of the country and its people at heart rather than the government we have now which is only interested in the financial well-being of its donors.

True, the Tories have made such an unholy pigs ear of the country that any new government will need decades to fix the mess - but that doesn’t mean we should give up. It just means that we should resolve to do all we can to ensure that these idiots never get elected again - at least until they abandon absolute greed and their far right ideology.

Downvotes are to be expected. There are an astonishingly large number of gullible people in the world, whether swallowing the fascist claptrap of the MAGA republicans or greedily swallowing the lies of Farage, Mogg, Johnson and the right wing press (largely but not exclusively controlled by Murdoch) or (and because I’m a woolly centrist) the far left policies of Momentum (who seem to be equally at home to weird conspiracy theories, and are so hell bent on their idea of perfection that they’d rather have a Conservative government in power than work with more moderate parties to oust them)

Re: Old tricks

You’re talking about the PC1512 there - and the whole fan fiasco was a smear by the manufacturers of competing, but much more expensive, IBM clones. Amstrad responded by releasing the PC1640 which had genuine improvements, not least EGA compatibility and an extra slot, as well as that unnecessary fan (in the monitor, not the system unit). It sold like hot cakes. Amstrads brand was certainly not dented - and they continued to sell well for another ten years or thereabouts.

By that time though, the entire computing business was over-commoditised - every computer was super cheap and in effect an Amstrad. So Amstrad pulled out of the market, their niche now being occupied by everyone else. Of course, super cheapness meant no profit to innovate with - so killing the Archimedes, Amiga, the ST Falcon and very nearly the Mac. These were not good times to be interested in computers. But that’s another story.

Re: The title is no longer required.

Hmm. You haven’t actually used one have you? I have several laptops (Lenovo, Dell and Apple), and the MacBook Air is the pick of the crop. Even with umpteen programs (IDEs, Office, Zoom etc) all running at the same time, it never seems to struggle or skip a beat. It runs cool if not stone cold - and I never have to remember to bring a power supply with me when I go to the office because it will happily go 10 hours with battery life to spare without being plugged in. I wish I could say the same of my other laptops. Oh, and it’s slim enough and light enough that I can carry it on my bike for the 20 mile ride to the office without feeling like I’m carrying a lead brick.

Yes, for video and render workloads there are quicker machines (that’s why the MacBook Pro exists after all), but for the work that most people need to do the Air is exactly the right machine for the job. And whilst Intel may have faster chips in absolute terms, it has nothing even approaching this level of performance in this form factor.

Why? If you don’t sign in then surely there’s no problem?

Re: Am I the only one

A couple of weeks ago my bicycle was at Lands End, yesterday it arrived in John O’Groats (nearly 1000 miles down the road) still carrying my middle aged arse (not to mention the rest of me). Pollution? Some particulates from the tyres, a little oil - and some particularly noisome exhaust after a curry in Glasgow - but, other than that, fairly minimal.

I do my commutes on it (16 miles each way) too. The point is that the car isn’t actually necessary for most journeys - and the least polluting fuel is the one that you’re going to need to consume anyway (breakfast). So yes, pat on the back Tesla for being less polluting than a fossil burning car (maybe) but it’s a bit like patting yourself on the back because your strychnine diet is less poisonous than novichok.

Oh, and before anyone complains that a bike isn’t practical for most people I’d like to point out that I met an 82 year old who was riding the same journey of 1000 miles on her bike.

Re: We are in the wrong business...

There is an awful lot of bullshit floating around in the Hifi world, almost like conspiracy theories. You can spend thousands on audio grade Ethernet for your digital streamer (!) although I haven’t yet seem any audio grade routers! You can spend thousands on speaker cable. You can spend tens of thousands on an individual speaker.

I would argue that for under a grand on the amp, a couple of hundred per speaker and a few tens of quid on speaker cable (plus the cost of the source of your choice) you can come up with a system which would, in blind testing, satisfy any audiophile.

Ultimately though, you don’t even need to spend that much. If your IKEA turntable and a Bluetooth speaker make you happy then who cares what anyone else thinks?